Have you noticed the growing reports about drought? Cities like Sao Paolo, Atlanta and Austin are nearly out of water. Utah may be entering a 1000 year drought. Australia is struggling. California has only one year of water left in its reservoirs. And so on around the world.

An Op Ed by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory senior water cycle scientist Jay Famiglietti calls for immediate water rationing, groundwater management legislation, long-term water management strategies, and public ownership of the issue. He emphasizes the need for an honest, transparent and forward-looking process, concluding: “Most important, we must make sure that there . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. À bon droit  2. The Factum 3. Global Workplace Insider  4. All About Information  5. National Blog

À bon droit
La passation de titre n’est possible que dans la mesure où elle se fonde sur une offre valide

La passation de titre est l’ultime expression de la volonté du . . . [more]

Perhaps the best way to raise awareness of the 2015 Bencher Elections is to highlight what the function of the law society is. The LSUC website states,

The main function of the Law Society of Upper Canada is to ensure that all persons who practise law or provide legal services in Ontario are competent, follow proper procedures and behave ethically.

Ethical behaviour is generally interpreted through the lens of the Rules of Professional Conduct, and is one of the main disciplinary functions of the law society. Discipline, though rarely pleasant, is one of the necessary components of self-regulation. Understandably . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

TRANSPORT ET AFFRÈTEMENT : Le contrat par lequel l’assuré de la demanderesse a retenu les services du défendeur pour naviguer son bateau d’un point à un autre, moyennant les modalités de paiement indiquées au contrat, n’est pas un contrat de transport régi par l’article 2030 C.C.Q., mais plutôt un contrat . . . [more]

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files. You may also subscribe to have chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 7
Town and Country

Those actively following or engaging with bencher election activities on Twitter will recognize this hashtag. It’s been pretty exciting to watch and be a part of. In the past week (April 10^th-16^th), 158 different contributors issued nearly 600 tweets and retweets with the #LSBencher hashtag. These tweets reached an estimated 266,000 people and appeared in user timelines an estimated 620,000 times. That’s huge!! Right?

Well, not necessarily.

Nearly 100 of the tweets came from three people.

Nearly one-third of the timeline views are attributable to three people, and nearly one-half are attributable to 6 people.

  . . . [more]

Prevention is better than cure, health professionals like to remind us. But what’s true for your physical well-being is arguably just as true for your emotional and financial health. That’s why it’s so important for people to recognize potential legal problems before they spin out of control and take over their lives.

As part of the events surrounding Law Day, which commemorates the signing of the Canadian Charter 33 years ago, the CBA has released six new legal health checks, in addition to an earlier six cards released last year. The goal is to get people to give . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Gamification for Law Firms

Stephanie L. Kimbro, Fellow at Stanford Law School Center on the Legal Profession and author of Virtual Law Practice: How to Deliver Legal Services Online (2nd Ed. ABA 2015).

Working paper published on March 13, 2015 and available on SSRN

Excerpt: Introduction and Part II

[Footnotes omitted. They . . . [more]

On March 26, 2015, the new Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (nouveau Code de déontologie des avocats) for Quebec lawyers came into force. All lawyer members of the Quebec Bar are required to complete a three-hour training session by December 31, 2015. . . . [more]

It takes a big person to admit they have made a mistake; it takes an even bigger judge. Justice Shaun Nakatsuru of the Ontario Court of Justice is such a judge.

In a remarkable judgment that has attracted significant media attention from the likes of the Toronto Star, the CBC and CTV, Judge Nakatsuru issued a personal and collective judicial mea culpa. While Justice Nakatsuru did not actually make a mistake per se, he admitted that as a judge he had “sinned” in terms of writing less than user-friendly judgments over the course of his ten years on . . . [more]

I don’t have a horse in this race — I’m not eligible to vote in the Law Society of Upper Canada (aka Ontario) Bencher election. Nonetheless, I know who I’d be voting for if I could.

Bencher elections are notorious for low participation rates across the country. I don’t understand this. Lawyers are typically engaged with politics in general, but for reasons I’m not privy to, fail to demonstrate the same level of engagement in respect of their own professional governance.

That’s a shame, but also an opportunity. Law society elections create an opening for the voices of lawyers from . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Law Society of Upper Canada v Hamalengwa, 2015 ONLSTH 57

[27] The Lawyer blamed the MAG and the LSUC for profiling him and picking on him because he is a black man. But the fact remains that the Lawyer billed about one-half of the $1.5 million in public funds spent on the Wills’ lawyers and amicuses. The Lawyer was the highest . . . [more]